NEIGHBORS / SHORT TAKES : Girl With Arthritis Makes Film on Crippling Legacy

Becky Burns, a 16-year-old from Moorpark, knows a bit about the strains and pains of arthritis. She suffers from juvenile arthritis, one of myriad forms of the disease that affects more than 37 million Americans, 200,000 of them children.

But Becky isn’t the type to be daunted by a challenge. So she picked up a video camera recently to make a movie in the Arthritis Foundation’s “Shoot for the Future” contest. The only instructions were to create a videotape portraying “what they would like to pass on to their own children someday.” Obviously, arthritis was not among the desired legacies.

Becky was voted best in the Most Thoughtful category, joining four Southern Californians who won in separate categories.

She had plenty to be thoughtful about. Research has established that certain forms of arthritis are genetically encoded and thus can be inherited. It’s how otherwise healthy children get the disease. But there is no way to block genetic transmission, and so arthritis remains a crippling legacy for future generations. Becky’s film and the films of the other winners focus in varying ways on this fact.

The race is on, however, to find chemical agents that will find the errant gene, work with it, and stop the disease in its tracks, said Lori Port, senior vice president of the Southern California Chapter of the Arthritis Foundation. Indeed, the very purpose of the film contest was to spotlight the success of recent studies, which establish the genetic link, as well as to seek funding for research that will lead to the right anti-transmission drug.

Becky, among others, is counting on it.

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Thin Mints.

Caramel DeLites.

Oh, yes, you resist cookies all year long. Until the Girl Scouts drop by. A good cause, you say.

Ha! You, like us, understand the weeks of pleasure from a box or two of Thin Mints tucked away in the freezer.

Unless you’re a customer of Dara Berman of Oxnard, Brownie Troop 109. Dara apparently doesn’t deal heavily with customers who buy just a box or two. Dara, along with five other Ventura County Girl Scouts, deals in volume. She sold 1,617 boxes this spring.

Our hats, and palettes, are tipped to Dara and to the ambitious company she keeps: Alicia Johnson, Oxnard, Cadette Troop 949, with 1,081 boxes; Brianne Law, Oxnard, Brownie Troop 655, with 1,064 boxes; Alisha Mericle, Thousand Oaks, Brownie Troop 478, with 1,045 boxes; Tashel Jaramillo, Ventura, Brownie Troop 513, with 1,000 boxes; and Anna Clifford, Thousand Oaks, Cadette Troop 934, with 852 boxes.

These six girls are among the top 10 sellers this year in the Tres Condados Girl Scout Council, which comprises Ventura, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo counties. The council derives half its operating budget from cookie sales.

Yet another reason to assuage that guilt about freezer treasures.

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The California Strawberry Festival, to be held Saturday and Sunday at College Park in Oxnard, will undoubtedly draw thousands, as it has in recent years. But while most visitors are happily awash in strawberries of every conceivable form, or are attending concerts that this year will include veteran blues belter Koko Taylor, few visitors stop to consider the festival’s unsung heroes: about 200 volunteers.

They greet you. Seat you. Assist you. Guide you. Point you every which way.

And have you noticed? Amid the chaos and crush of berry-mad children and families, they’re always smiling.

Consider the Stewart family: Bruce and Barbara and their 14-year-old son, Brian. They have lived in Oxnard since 1973. They love to volunteer and plan to do it again this year.

“We get to meet people from all over California, and we enjoy donating our time to help the community,” says Barbara. And Brian? This ninth-grader at Hueneme High School is more specific: “Mom first took me along about four years ago, and I got to help kids inside the arts and crafts tent. So I go every year because I like being with the kids and get to help make crafts.”

Daisy Tatum, vice principal at Hueneme High School, is in charge of the volunteers. “This is one way that the festival brings our community together,” she says. “Families, couples, friends, people of all ages volunteer and come back year after year.”

Isabel Doyle couldn’t agree more. She and her husband have volunteered eight years in a row and have, as a result, witnessed astonishing levels of loyalty among patrons. “Sometimes we end up with sore feet and a sunburn, but we get great satisfaction and it’s amazing who you see,” she says. “We knew some people who moved to Las Vegas and came back with a busload of visitors for the festival.”